[SOLVED] Computer Stuck at blinking cursor top left after adding drives

[soul1987]

Hey folks,

I am trying to diagnose a strange issue with my computer. The computer stucks at the blinking cursor before I can enter bios (using f2 or del). I think what seems to be causing problem is the amount of sata drives through PCI-E. I have two pci-e sata expansion cards, that should give me 36 sata ports in theory. And the motherboard itself has 8 sata poorts itself. As long as the number of attached sata drives to PCI-E exceed 30 it will just stuck at the blinking cursor. However, if I only connect 30 drives or below to the PCI-E expansion cards, the issue will disappear and I am able to enter the normal booting process. . The connection to the 8 on board sata points does not seem to affect anything here.

Here is a detailed configure of my computer:
motherboard: turf gaming 570x-plus
CPU:5900 x
x16 slot : old nvidia graphics card (can't remember model number)
x1 slot: sata expansion card with 16 sata ports (asmedia 1640 chip)
x1 slot: sata expansion card with 20 sata ports (asmedia 1640 chip)

What I've tried:

1. I tried to disable S.M.A.R.T, along with other tweaks but none of them work.
2. I can un-plugging devices and keep 30 HDD to PCI-E in order for the machine to boot. After booting I hot-plug (not sure if this is a good idea) and all HDDs seem to work just fine. I just can't connect all the drives at startup time otherwise the screen will stuck at the blinking cursor.
3. Disconnecting different HDD doesn't seem to affect the issue, as long as the total HDD connects to pci-e exceeds 30 it will just hang there forever.

Would appreciate advice or directions to solving the problem. My guess is that somehow there were some errors at POST stage but I am not sure how to switch it off.

Best,
Wei

 

[kerberos_20]

try enable above 4G decoding in bios options
asmedia 1640 doesnt exist, its perhaps asm1064? which would be 4x sata, so there should be another chip for sata port multiplier
eitherway this seems to be bios limitation if it works after you leave bios and hot swap them later on

you could try disable optional oprom, it should be somewhere in bios settings, that will make your sata drives connected to those pcie adapters non bootable (bios will not load them), but OS will see those drives